The Blue Mountain (48 page)
‘They’re all here,’ he spluttered. ‘The whole damn family. I’m supposed to put in a seed bid and find tractors for the grain fields, and instead I have my hands full with Mirkin’s two idiotic grandsons, the mad fucker and the mad undertaker, a swamp revivalist, and an insane old beetlemaniac.’
Pinness put a restraining hand on my neck, Uri took his arm, and we went off to the old teacher’s house to have tea.
‘Maybe now that he has a swamp to drain, Shifris will finally turn up,’ Uri said.
‘Or Efrayim,’ I added.
‘We’ve seen the last of them both,’ declared Pinness.
N
o one knew the name of the Valley’s old barber. Everyone called him ‘the Rabbi’, and though he always insisted, ‘I’m just an ordinary Jew,’ he seemed to like the title. A resident of a co-operative farming village of religious Jews in the north- west corner of the Valley, he also doubled as a cantor and circumciser.
Once, in my childhood, when Grandfather was asked to treat a sick orchard there, he took me along. As we set out on the track that ran through the fields, he let me hold the reins. Zeitser covered the whole distance in an easy, steady trot. He enjoyed these breaks in his daily routine because they took him all over the valley, and he returned from them raring to go to work more than ever.
Grandfather spoke to the bearded planters in a language I didn’t understand. It was not the language he wrote to Shulamit in but the one Levin used when talking to the wholesalers in his store. On our way back he humorously described for me how the religious farmers got around the biblical injunction against sowing mingled seed in one field. ‘One goes and sows hay, and the next day another comes back and sows legumes, pretending he didn’t know the first was there.’
These religious farmers were odd types. They never swore when they looked up at a cloudless sky in autumn. Though they weren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath, they milked their cows to keep them from suffering, putting a floor tile in each bucket to make God think that the milk had been spilled on the ground. On Passover they saw to it that their livestock ate no leavened food, which so tickled the fancy of Eliezer Liberson, it was said, that he
rode off to their village to sing their cows a comic Passover song called ‘
Moo Nishtanah
’.
Being good-natured folk who had a sense of humour, they did not take it amiss, and as soon as the holiday was over they sent a delegation to Liberson’s farm. With it came a crate of bread, jars of red horseradish guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes, bottles of home-made schnapps that packed a wallop, and cans of pickled herring that drew founding fathers from all over the Valley by magic fetters of longing. When the peppery, cockles-of- the-heart-warming banquet was over, the visitors winked at each other, trooped off to Liberson’s turkey run, and shouted, ‘Hurrah for Socialism!’ in a mighty chorus.
The moronic birds cackled an enthusiastic chorus of agreement, and even Fanya Liberson burst into loud laughter and told her mortified husband that he had been bested.
The cantor-barber-circumciser was now very old. He had first arrived in the Valley long ago, brought in a cart from the city beyond the mountain to circumcise my uncle Avraham. The wagon skimmed over the resilient paths of spring, a good smell of horses and flowers filled the air, and the young man, whose long beard hid a soft, pale complexion, was enthralled by the purring magic of the land. He went on dreaming of it after returning home, and when he looked at our blue mountain from the other side, the Valley appeared above it in fair weather like a mirage, its upside-down image so tempting in the sky that it gave his heart no rest. When he heard that a group of Hasidim had decided to form a farming village there, he hurried to join them. A year later, however, a full cart ran over him, the wooden wheels smashed both his knees, and he was forced to return to his old profession.
His work took him all over the Valley. One day in a field he saw a hefty woman, her chin adorned by several bristly hairs, harnessed to a light Arab plough on whose handle leaned a ten-year- old boy. Captivated by the girth of this Astarte’s columned legs, by her grunts of exertion, and by the sweat stains tracing her armpits, the Hasid stopped to ask about her. Her name was Tehiya Fein. Her husband, he was told by the local farmers, had
divorced her and gone back to Bolshevik Russia ‘to light the world with the torch of Revolution’, leaving her hardened and embittered. The ten-year-old, they hastened to add, was not her child but the son of neighbours who felt sorry for her.
The Rabbi asked the villagers to arrange a match for him. For their part, they were only too happy to be rid of the woman, who had sorely tried the principle of mutual aid they all subscribed to. Before two weeks were up she had covered her hair with a kerchief like a good Hasid’s wife and followed her new husband, pulling after her by a rope a small calf and a donkey loaded with all her possessions.
Though the Atlas of a bride was infertile, she was industrious and good-humoured. She learned to observe every jot and tittle of Jewish law and worked the Rabbi’s farm for him, producing bountiful harvests in place of children while he continued to wander the Valley. At first he made the rounds of the kibbutzim and villages on foot, kosherly slitting the throats of chickens, pedicuring cows, clipping locks and foreskins, and marvelling at the bare thighs of female pioneers and the fragrance of freshly tilled earth. With his earnings he bought a small two-wheeled cart hitched by a tall light-footed Cypriot donkey, and after the war he acquired an old BSA motorcycle with a sidecar from British army surplus.
When I was a boy he visited our village once a month. First you saw from afar a speeding grey cyclone crossing the fields like an autumn dust devil, next you heard the muffled chatter of his old piston, and then came the moment you were waiting for. Squeezing the throttle of his cycle, the old Hasid raced it down the bank of the wadi and flew heavily across to the other side with a loud cry of ‘Yippee!’ His face beamed. His grey coat and the ritual fringes of his undershirt flapped in the wind. On his head was a leather pilot’s helmet with his thick sidelocks stuffed inside, shielding his eyes was a pair of tractor goggles, and in his sidecar rattled an astonishing wooden chest that opened up into a barber’s cabinet. Collapsible legs unfolded from its bottom, while out of its drawers came razor blades, scissors, a stained sheet, and a manual clipper. Spreading the sheet over his customer and
a newspaper over the table, the old barber wagged his shears and tongue and gossiped about the surrounding villages.
He was an unfailing source of news and information from all over the Valley. It was he who took Shlomo Levin’s letters to the matchmakers and drove him secretly to Tiberias for his first meeting with Rachel. He transmitted clandestine notes to and from Rilov, tipped us off that the boys from the next-door kibbutz were planning to waylay us with stones, brought word that the new stud horse at the experimental farm was possessed of prodigious powers (‘His sheaf arises and also stays upright like Joseph’s in his dream,’ he told us with a grin), and devoutly spread the word about Uri’s escapades after my cousin was caught. Taken with a grain of salt, his reports were of considerable value. He also volunteered to sniff around for news of Efrayim, in whom he took a special interest not only because he had cut his hair in the privacy of his room, but also because it was my uncle who had obtained his pilot’s helmet for him from the British air base.
He was our village barber for half a century. He had cut Grandfather’s hair, Efrayim’s, Avraham’s, my mother’s and father’s, Uri’s, Yosi’s, my own, everyone’s. ‘The same teacher, the same barber, the same earth,’ Uri said. ‘What a cosy sense of continuity!’ Early each summer all the children were sent to him to have their heads shaved, which saved the village money as well as strengthening the roots of their hair. The indignant youngsters squirmed and had tantrums in the barber’s chair, but I, acting on Grandfather’s orders, sat there ‘as quiet as a mouse’, the only child who did not have to be subdued by sheer force while the Rabbi’s pinchy clippers made a single broad part from the victim’s forehead to his neck. ‘Make haste, my beloved,’ he would sing as he released the partially shorn child, who would jump up and run for dear life, only to return before long with the plea that his tormentor finish the job.
Every year the Committee hired the Rabbi to lead High Holy Day services for the handful of villagers who attended our little synagogue. When the holidays were over he returned home with
a wad of notes, several trussed hens, a crate of pomegranates, figs, raisiny late grapes, and – if the year had been a good one – a large jar of cream.
Now that he was old, so that ‘his hands shook from long years of prayer and motorcycling’, he was no longer entrusted with such delicate tasks as haircutting and circumcision. Eventually, having grown too weak to sing or blow the ram’s horn, he found us a new cantor, an extremely Orthodox cousin of his from the city beyond the blue mountain.
The Committee sent Uzi Rilov in an open jeep to pick them up at the railway station. The Weissbergs – the new cantor and his wife, their adolescent daughter, and their little twin boys – were equally shocked by the jouncing, dusty ride through the fields and Uzi’s immodestly bared shoulders. Mrs Weissberg and her daughter chastely declined the offer of his hand to help them down from the jeep. Soon after their arrival a good smell of sweet and unfamiliar cookery came wafting from Avraham and Rivka’s house.
The new cantor was unlike his predecessor. He did not know anyone in the village, and the earth of the Valley held no appeal for him. On the morning after they came his wife hung clothes on Rivka’s washing-line the likes of which we had never seen before, and a little later Weissberg stepped out onto the porch and began to practise his ram’s horn, slicing the air into shivering strips that sent hundreds of roof-roosting pigeons high into the sky.
The cantor’s twin boys startled the village youth with their long sidelocks and socks and the huge velvet skullcaps that covered their shaven heads. Overwhelmed by sun, fresh fruit, and the smells of cowshed and field, they tiptoed through the farmyards gaping at the poultry and livestock while lisping to each other in a rapid speech whose strange diction could not be understood. They were especially frightened by the cows in heat, mounting each other brazenly, and by the mules, those half-asses and half-horses that seemed to have stepped out of the pages of a devilish bestiary. The village children pointed and jeered at them from a safe distance, afraid to approach such exotic creatures too closely. Even Pinness, who stared at them as if straining to
remember, was unable to connect them with the childhood that had been erased from the lobes of his brain.
‘I know them from somewhere,’ the old man kept saying, ‘but I can’t seem to place them.’
Dark and sombre-looking like her father, the Weissbergs’ daughter spent most of her time in the house, although I sometimes saw her towards evening, garbed in long dresses, strolling arm in arm with her mother along the village’s palm-shaded main street. They were not at all like our own freckled women and girls, whose fruity, gullible charms were blown afar by the breezes. As they walked with lowered eyes and small steps, talking in low tones, mother and daughter appeared to be fleeing the burly farmers and their bare-chested sons, defending their virtue with the little handkerchiefs they clasped in their hands, their ceaseless murmuring, and the armour of their clothing, which precluded all conjecture concerning what lay beneath it.
Late one afternoon Busquilla invited the Weissbergs to visit the cemetery. Uri and I were weeding the flower beds while Pinness sat nearby. When Busquilla finished explaining the nature of our enterprise to his guests, the cantor nodded and said, ‘It is a great commandment to bury the dead properly, a great commandment.’ He did not know, of course, that we broke all the rules by burying them in coffins, without prayers or pious beggars to give alms to.
I straightened up as they approached and greeted us, struck dumb by the beauty of the cantor’s daughter. Her complexion was a heart-rending mixture of peach and olive, and her dark eyes were lowered beneath prominent brows curved as finely and sharply as a sickle. Until then the only women I had ever known were the women of the Valley. Half were too old, and I had seen so much of the other half since infancy that they held no interest for me.
‘Allow me, Cantor, to introduce our teacher, Ya’akov Pinness,’ said Busquilla. ‘This is Baruch, my boss, and this is Uri, in whose parents’ home we have been privileged to house you.’
‘Welcome to our village,’ said Pinness dryly.
The cantor smiled.
‘Weissberg is the name,’ he said. ‘I’m pleased to meet you. You’ve been very hospitable.’
‘Be careful in the kitchen, Cantor,’ said Uri. ‘There may be some old bread lying around.’
‘That will do, Uri!’ said Pinness, instantly on guard.
‘Bread?’ The cantor did not know my cousin yet.
‘Isn’t Yom Kippur the day on which you eat only
matzo
?’
‘That’s enough, Uri. You should be ashamed of yourself,’ scolded Busquilla. ‘Please forgive him, Cantor.’
‘We brought our own food from home,’ laughed the little twins. A frown on his face, their father hushed them sternly.
An end-of-summer melancholy hung in the air, causing us all to fall silent. From the orange groves came the pungent smell of autumn manuring, and you could hear the mournful death of summer in the clucks of Ya’akovi’s geese as they flung themselves against the wire of their pens, quacking painfully at the sight of the Africa-bound birds overhead.
‘Summer and winter, swallow and heron,’ said Pinness in the solemn tone he generally saved for his classes in biblical poetry. I could tell from the enigmatic smile on his lips that the old man was once again listening to the seasons changing inside him.
‘As the last fruits of summer, as the gleanings of the vintage,’ answered the cantor, matching scripture for scripture. Relaxing, he permitted himself to smile.
